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2/24/2016

The inimitable Saul Williams just released a video for “The Noise Came From Here,” a single off of his recent album MartyrLoserKing.
In the clip, Williams walks barefoot through the streets of Ferguson,
MO, a city that’s been the center of highly publicized conflict over the
course of the past year when a white police officer walked free after
killing Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in 2014. As The FADER
points out, Williams is accompanied by the poet Marcellus Buckley (a
friend of Brown’s) and the local Reverend Osagyefo Sekou, who commented
on Williams and the role of artists as activists:

They are in strategy sessions, holding politicians
accountable, and offering programmatic and proximate solutions to our
insufferable and insoluble problems. Art not only prefigures
possibility—it acts as a salve to a wounded people—transforming them
into wounded healers.

He then added:

As a front line activist in the Mike Brown movement the
role of music has been one of our biggest inspirations, but over time
our actions have influenced musicians and artists to speak out against
injustice and inequality everywhere.